Colour traditional-style tattoo on the upper arm showing a mermaid with a zodiac medallion, a red heart, pink roses, a skull and a blue rose.

Mermaid and heart upper arm sleeve

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A mermaid holding flowers and a mirror sits above waves, with a large red heart, pink roses, a skull, a blue rose and smaller flowers below. The outlines are bold and dark, with flat solid fills and some soft shading in the water and petals. Colour ink dominates the design, with red, blue, green, yellow and pink against the pale skin, and the piece covers much of the upper arm.

Traditional Botanical Upper arm Mermaid Heart Rose Skull Flower Mirror Wave Zodiac symbol Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every autumn the old pupils of Caddon Bay school walked down to the hall for their reunion, and every autumn the sea crept up to the bottom step to watch them. The year the roof was mended, a mermaid came up the slipway in the dusk. Her tail was green as bottle glass and her hair hung down her back like wet rope. She carried a bunch of white flowers in one hand and a hand mirror in the other, and she set both on the bottom step and waited.

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Nobody spoke to her, because it was the custom that nobody speaks first to what comes out of the water. Mrs Abernethy, who had taught them their letters and kept the register for thirty years, went down the steps with her spectacles on a string. She picked up the mirror and looked into it a long while, then turned it so the mermaid could see. The mermaid smiled, and it was not an unkind smile.

Inside, the hall was loud with tea urns and old arguments. Nobody could remember who had cried the most in Miss Pell's class, or who had taken the chalk. Davy Moss swore he had once seen a woman combing her hair on the rocks below the school field, the winter the wind took the bell. Mrs Abernethy did not laugh at him. She came back up the steps and set the mirror face down on the piano lid.

At the end of the night the flowers were still on the bottom step, and the mermaid was gone. Beside them lay a red stone shaped like a heart, smooth as a boiled sweet and still warm from the sun. Mrs Abernethy put it in her handbag and never said what the mirror had shown her.